LOT 3609

World War II. 50th Anniversary Cased Proof Silver Commemorative Coin Collection. 1994.

Silver Proof Three-Coin Collection, FDC Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Allied Invasion of Europe, to mark the Anniversary of the D-Day Landings, two countries have joined forces with the United Kingdom to form a superb three-coin silver collection containing from France a one franc piece, from the United States of America a one dollar coin and from the United Kingdom a fifty pence coin. Proof.(258gr total, case 16.5cm). [No Reserve]

Acquired on the UK art market;
Property of a Essex, UK, collector.

Accompanied by two certificates of authenticity issued by the Royal mint and one from Monnaie de Paris.

'Operation Overlord’, the Allied invasion of Europe, was undoubtedly the greatest amphibious operation ever undertaken in the history of warfare. To Winston Churchill writing to President Roosevelt, it was 'by far the greatest thing we have ever attempted'. Its outstanding success was to spell the beginning of the end of Nazi oppression in Europe. Almost from the fall of France in 1940, plans began for her liberation and by the spring of 1944 more than three million troops had assembled in southern England in readiness for the landings on Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, the five Normandy beaches which covered a fifty mile front between Le Havre and Cherbourg. The exact date and location of the planned invasion was one of the best kept secrets of the war and Operation Overlord was able to begin after midnight on 6 June 1944, in the first hours of that 'longest day' that would forever be known as D-Day. The successful assault on the five beaches, the fierce battles that followed and the Allied breakout into France led to the victorious liberation of Paris on 25 August. By September most of France was free and within a year western Europe too, was free.